Joinery and Traditional Woodworking

For my project I am going to be studying traditional joinery. I will spend part of my time researching different joints used in traditional woodworking including where they came from, their benefits and weaknesses and some of their common applications. Then I will look for a simple project that uses that specific joint and complete it. I hope to get through one to three different types each depending on the difficulty of each joint. For a few of my test projects I am planning to make things that could be useful in the school. Some examples are: building a bench to replace the one on the fourth floor that broke, or building a better yardstick holder for the physics lab. As I will be spending most of my time working in the art room, I will also be helping James teach his art classes which will give me a chance to take everything I have been taught in his class over the last 4 years and learn how to teach it to others. This project matters to me for a number of reasons. First, woodworking has been something I have come to really love but I have not had a chance to really study it in a deep way and this project gives me the time and space to really dive deep into that passion. And second on a more personal note, one of my earliest memories at LREI is from the Fours when our class built little boats out of scrap wood with our teachers Seth and Stacey. That has remained one of my favorite memories throughout my time at LREI and I think it would be nice to sort of bookend my time here with these projects. This project will fill all four of the requirement buckets. It is creative because I am hand making each of the small studies. It is academic because I will be spending lots of time researching these joints as well and taking the time to learn how to make them myself. It accomplishes Experience because I will be learning about how to teach art and actually getting to assist in teaching a class. And lastly, it fills service because I will both be helping to teach others in my community and will be making things to help improve the space we all share.

I will measure the success of this project through two main metrics. Most importantly is how much I learn about joinery like the different types of joints, their strengths and weaknesses, what they are commonly used for and more. The second way is through my ability to take this knowledge of the joints and put it into practice making my own pieces. My goal is to make a functional piece of work using each of the joints that I research.